Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know.

Joseph Conrad,

The Heart of Darkness

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Norman Maclean,

“A River Runs Through It”

INTRODUCTION

If I were a creative writer (which, mercifully, I am not) and stumbled upon this volume, I would be inclined simply to give up and find another line of work. Caitlín R. Kiernan is so much better than anyone writing imaginative fiction today that it has become something of an embarrassment. She is the best in her field at so many things – best in the exquisite modulation of her prose; best in the sensitive portrayal of the complex and at times contradictory motivations of humans, quasi-humans, and non-humans; and, most of all, best in the compelling evocation of fear, terror, loneliness, pain, tragedy, and heartbreak. In little over two decades of writing she has generated ten or eleven novels and thirteen short story collections, along with several separately published short novels. So she combines a gratifying productivity along with an impeccable standard of merit, and we can expect her to maintain that fusion of quality and quantity for many years to come.

One of the many distinctive qualities of her work – perhaps more readily visible in her story collections than in her novels – is her effortless mastery of a multiplicity of genres. In this book we have stories of supernatural horror, science fiction, fantasy, even some noir or hard-boiled crime tales – and, more provocatively, a melding of these and other genres into something beyond description or classification. This wide range again distinguishes her from her peers. Who can match it? Strangely enough, the only writer I can think of is the venerable William F. Nolan, who in every other regard is about as antipodal to Kiernan as any writer can possibly be. Or perhaps we have to go all the way back to the
fons et origo
of weird fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, who revolutionised the tale of supernatural and psychological horror, who all but founded the detective story, and who even engaged in cosmic fantasy (if his nonfiction treatise
Eureka
can be so classified).

There is, in addition to a diversity of genres, a matching diversity of tone and ambiance. It may be true that, in general, an overriding atmosphere of melancholy pervades all her narratives, but she is eminently able to vary the mood when the opportunity arises. In part, this variation is the product of the shifting or blending of genres Kiernan effects. Who would have expected her to write in the tough, hard-boiled manner of Hammett and Chandler? But in “The Maltese Unicorn” she brilliantly turns the trick; and noir elements are also present, along with much else besides, in the short novel
Black Helicopters
and the noir/cyberpunk hybrid “Hydrarguros.”

But it is those tales that touch on heartbreak and the regret for lost lives, lost loves, and lost happiness that most move us. “Pony” is a vignette dedicated to love, sex, apple orchards, and stone walls. It was later incorporated into what I still regard as her most accomplished and evocative novel,
The Red Tree
(2009), although the award-winning
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
(2012) is a close second. A prose poem like “A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills” can be contrasted with the brooding stream-of-consciousness of the science fiction tale “A Season of Broken Dolls,” which in turn is contrasted with the steampunk mode of “The Steam Dancer (1896).”

This volume, perhaps more than many of its predecessors, also displays the dynamic and imaginative manner in which its author engages with the work of her predecessors. A critic once chastised H. P. Lovecraft for being “too well read,” by which he meant that Lovecraft had absorbed so many of the great writers of weird fiction before and during his lifetime that it sometimes became difficult to know what was Lovecraft’s own imaginative creation and what was some conscious or unconscious recollection of something he had read. The criticism is, to my mind, unjust; for, like Shakespeare, Handel, and so many other creative artists, Lovecraft almost always transmuted what he borrowed from others, so that it became distinctively his own.

And we can say very much the same, to an amplified degree, for Kiernan’s work. The very title of this book looks back to Homer and his “wine-dark sea,” perhaps by way of Robert Aickman, who used that phrase for the title of one of his more memorable stories. The opening story, “Bradbury Weather,” trumpets itself as a homage to Ray Bradbury, but it is so much more than that. Even the author of
The Martian Chronicles
might have been challenged to feature the extraordinary union of clutching horror and inexpressible poignancy that we find in this slowly building narrative. A later story, “The Melusine (1898),” may also betray a Bradbury influence in its use of the carnival theme – but of course that theme is not owned by Bradbury, and this tale is more an echo of Kiernan’s own fascination with the figure of the mermaid and analogous entities.

Other tales make nods to other writers – but only as a way of acknowledging their work as a springboard for the release of Kiernan’s own imagination. Are we to think of “In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection,” with its vivid second-person narration, as an evocation of the Frankenstein motif? The author candidly acknowledges “Untitled 17” as a tribute to Angela Carter’s
The Company of Wolves,
while “The Sea Troll’s Daughter” harks all the way back to
Beowulf
– an offshoot of her writing the novelization of that ancient text following the 2007 film. “One Tree Hill,” although vividly summoning up the spectral depths of New England history and topography, is a nod to T. E. D. Klein’s expansive novel
The Ceremonies
(1984), itself an homage to Machen, Lovecraft, and other classic weird fictionists.

Lovecraft, indeed, is a writer to whom Kiernan has returned time and again – and her imaginative elaborations of this writer far predate her relocation from the South to Lovecraft’s native city of Providence, R.I., in 2008, as attested by several short stories and the novel
The Daughter of Hounds
(2007), a riff on Lovecraft’s concept of ghouls.

Pickman himself is the focus (even though he never actually appears in the narrative) of “Pickman’s Other Model,” whose deliberately old-fashioned prose and manner of narration, using Lovecraft’s patented method of the documentary style, paradoxically reveals Kiernan’s own sophistication – her awareness of the ambiguities inherent in the historical record and the mysteries that may lurk beyond and behind bland newspaper reports and film reviews.

There is a vaguely Lovecraftian air to “As Red as Red,” a rumination on certain historical features found in “The Shunned House” (1924), while “Fish Bride” and “Houndwife” infuse Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Hound” with a plangency those narratives consciously lack, as Kiernan teases out the emotive ramifications of their horrific scenarios. But her tales are by no means lacking in terror; the single sentence “The hound bays.” toward the end of the latter is balefully potent.

Literature is not the only fount of inspiration that Kiernan has drawn upon. “The Ape’s Wife” is a half-parodic, half-touching tribute to the film
King Kong
– but here the inherent absurdity of that scenario is shorn away and the implacable plangency of the interspecies love story is brought to the fore. “In View of Nothing” is a science fiction tale that presents a tip of the hat to the music of David Bowie.

Kiernan’s well-known scientific training – she was trained in vertebrate palaeontology and has written learned papers on the subject – infuses much of her work, but she is careful not to let pure science overwhelm any narrative, even those science fiction tales set in the far future where scientific advance has perhaps rendered the distinction between human and non-human ambiguous at best and meaningless at worst. In this sense, “The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)” is representative. It is not, indeed, a science fiction tale – far from it. Instead, it features a complex interplay of science (ammonites – a kind of extinct mollusc – are inlaid into the wood of a violin), crime, loss, and art.

But, more than any other feature of her work, it is Kiernan’s prose that keeps us coming back to her over and over again, like a crazed drug addict desperate for his daily fix. Her prose is
sensuous
in the best sense of the much-abused term. By this I do not refer to the frequent erotic episodes in Kiernan’s work – episodes whose languorous panache make her one of the more stimulating sex writers of our time. Many of her sexual scenarios involve lesbianism, although there is some token heterosexual sex here and there; and Kiernan’s penchant for depicting sexual congress with aliens, androids, and other anomalous entities adds a distinctive flavour to much of her writing.

But that is not what I mean by calling her prose sensuous. Even in those passages whose subject-matter is perfectly chaste, her prose beckons us with a lapidary manipulation of rhythm and sense that conveys so much more than what is written on the page. Consider a paragraph chosen almost at random from “Pony”:

A thousand variations on a single moment. It doesn’t matter which one’s for real, or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even sure that I can remember anymore, not for certain. They’ve all bled together through days and nights and repetition, like sepia ink and cheap wine, and by the time I’ve finally caught up with you (because I always catch up with you, sooner or later), you’re standing at the low stone wall dividing the orchard from the field. You’re leaning forward against the wall, one leg up and your knee pressed to the granite and slate as if you were about to climb over it but then forgot what you were doing. The field is wide, and I think it might go on forever, that the wall might be here to keep apart more than an old orchard and a fallow plot of land.

What a deft intertwining of topographical description, pensive reflections on past and present, and dreamlike wistfulness! And yet, how different is this prose-poeticism from the tough-guy (or tough-gal?) style of “The Maltese Unicorn” (“It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but, you ask them, that’s jake, cause so would anyone else”). Again, diversity of genre produces diversity of style, tone, and mood.

In “Galápagos” Kiernan has written: “There are sights and experiences to which the blunt and finite tools of human language are not equal.” This may be true, even a truism; but, just as Lovecraft, for all his use (and overuse) of words such as “unnamable” and “indescribable,” sought to portray his outré images and conceptions to the best of his considerable ability, Kiernan uses all the rhetorical tools available to her to make the reader grasp the bizarre, terrifying, at times ineffable scenes she has so carefully orchestrated. I will cite only one example and let it serve for the whole. “Tidal Forces” is an incredible fusion of cosmicism and body horror, and the almost inconceivable nature of the weirdness of this scenario is summed up in one imperishable sentence: “I think there are galaxies trapped within her eyes.”

The more we learn about Kiernan, the more we see that there is an inextricable fusion between her life and her work. This is no doubt true for any author, but in Kiernan’s case there seems to be something more going on; and that is why readers will appreciate the story notes, brief and laconic as some of them are, found in this book. We learn, for example, that “And the Cloud That Took the Form” is an expression of her
ouranophobia
– a fear of the wide-open sky. It becomes evident that Kiernan’s life experiences enter into, and even in some mysterious way engender, the most distinctive features of her work, and future biographers and critics will be kept busy tracing the interrelations between the two.

Caitlín R. Kiernan does not care to be called a “horror writer,” and with good reason: that term is far too crude and blunt to convey even a fraction of all the diverse elements that make her work unique. Perhaps she wishes to be a writer of what Lovecraft called “weird fiction”; or maybe she prefers Aickman’s coinage “strange stories.” These terms seem sufficiently broad and ambiguous to encompass the multiplicity of tones, moods, manners, and motifs that make up Kiernan’s short fiction, and in this volume you will find the full range of her work amply displayed. Her output to date has already placed her at the head of her field; she has nothing more to prove. Any subsequent work can only augment her achievement.

– S. T. Joshi

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